More-Than-Human

Genese Marie Sodikoff

Related terms: Actor-Network Theory, co-becoming, multispecies ethnography, posthumanism, Umwelt

There’s a bleat in my throat. Words fail me here. Can you understand? I sink
to
my knees tired or not. I now know the ragweed from the goldenrod, and the
blinding beauty of green. Don't you see? I am shedding my skins. I am a paper hive, a
wolf spider,
the creeping ivy, the ache of a birch, a heifer, a doe.

Vievee Francis, “Another Antipastoral” (2016)

An excerpt from Vievee Francis’s poem distils the environmental ethos of the “more-than-human”: a vision of earthly entanglement where humans are not sovereign selves but patchworks of plant and animal bodies, as well as their histories (Lorimer and Hodgetts 2024). This perspective does not direct our gaze toward the divine but instead toward the world-making capacities of our co-inhabitants (Whatmore 2002; Ingold 2021; Hathaway 2022).

Historically, humanity has imagined itself as separate from the ecosystems that sustain it – a special branch on the tree of life. A more-than-human approach exposes the delusion of “ontological insularity” (Locke 2013, 82), insisting instead that species are entwined in the lived realities of other animate and inanimate entities. In this view, the human “becomes with” other beings – our minds and biologies encased in porous skin, leaving us open, malleable, and perpetually in flux (Masco 2004; Haraway 2008; Bingham and Hinchliffe 2008; Greenhough et al. 2024). The concept denotes a “recognition of the essential co-constitution of people with the beings (other people, non-human animals, plants, processes, affects, and all that is tangible and intangible) with whom they belong” (Wright 2014).

The concept of “more-than-human” in social science and humanities arose as a challenge to the idea of human exceptionalism and human domination over nonhuman lives. As a theoretical orientation, it strives to redefine humanity as an amalgam of other species and ecological forms, a view that is based on biological and cognitive continuities rather than distinct boundaries.

Originating in early European inquiries into animal consciousness – from Descartes’ dismissal of animal awareness, likening animals to “beast-machines,” to Hume’s emphasis on shared perception and Darwin’s view of an evolutionary continuum – this perspective gained momentum with twentieth-century thinkers, such as Donald R. Griffin, Thomas Nagel, Peter Singer, Martha C. Nussbaum, Frans B.M de Waal, and Donna Haraway, who highlight qualities of nonhuman animals that had been considered mostly, if not exclusively, human: cognition, empathy, suffering, and, consequently, rights (Descartes 1864 [1637]; Darwin 1892 [1871]; Haraway 1989; Singer 2001 [1975]; Griffin 1981; Nussbaum 2006; de Waal 2008; Tanaka 2021). Philosophers and scientists working on these themes inspired a variety of disciplines, inspiring and being inspired by feminist theory, decolonial practice, and multispecies ethnography (Plumwood 1993; Smith 1999; Kirksey and Helmreich 2010; Liboiron 2021). These fields, elaborated on below, share the aim of unsettling various exceptionalisms by stressing the partial, situated nature of all knowledge.

This theoretical orientation often sees anthropomorphism as something to overcome – that is, the reflexive projection of the human onto the nonhuman – to appreciate other modalities of being. On the other hand, it embraces becoming attuned to ourselves in the material archives of the landscape, such as fingerprints whorling like tree rings, the Fibonacci Sequence of nautilus shells echoing human ears, mycelial networks communicating like neural synapses, and river deltas branching like lungs (Abram 1996; Ingold 2011; Tsing 2015; Kimmerer 2013).

By decentering the human, investigators expose the limitations of anthropocentrism while still striving – however imperfectly – to engage with the agency and world-making of other life forms. This also involves acknowledging that nonhuman beings inhabit perceptual worlds fundamentally other to our own. They build and occupy their own  

Feminist theory played a significant role in deconstructing rigid dualisms, such as male/female, human/animal, and nature/culture, thereby fostering a more inclusive understanding of multipart and interconnected being. Integral to this movement, the ethics of care, with an emphasis on interdependence and relationality, has asserted the moral necessity of extending compassion toward the nonhuman world (Noddings 1984; Gilligan 1982; Parreñas 2018). Furthermore, the concept of intersectionality, which illuminates how various forms of oppression overlap and reinforce one another, has shed light on the speciesism inherent in anthropocentrism (Crenshaw 1989).

Distinct from the broader fields of “human-animal relations” or “animal studies,” the subfield of multispecies ethnography within the social sciences expands the scope of investigation to include a diverse array of nonhuman lifeforms – microbes, plants, and fungi – entities historically overlooked in traditional human-animal frameworks (Ogden et al. 2013; van Dooren et al. 2016; Lorimer 2017). This move has reshaped ethnographic inquiry, challenging conventional notions of social life.

For those schooled in Western thought, the challenge is to reconceive human being as a node within a mesh of culture, biology, meaning-making, and “vibrant matter” (Barad 2007; Bennett 2010; Kohn 2013; Hathaway 2018). To imagine radical otherness, we must quiet our sensory biases to perceive “other modalities of being that are not our own and will never be fully sensible to us” (Yusoff 2013, 209).

Drawing from decolonial theory and Indigenous animist cosmologies, the more-than-human perspective aims to disrupt entrenched hierarchies – not only within human societies but also between species. It posits that humans are neither biologically nor morally superior but are instead entangled with others in ever-changing, reciprocal relationships.

Such posthumanist humility carries the moral imperative to appreciate life in its immense diversity – all the loved and unloved creatures – and to safeguard what remains (Bird and Van Dooren 2011). Indigenous scholars hold up animist worldviews as a model, as some Indigenous societies have traditionally engaged with “sentient environments, with cosmologies that enmesh people into complex relationships between themselves and all relations” (Todd 2016, 6-7). The Bawaka Country, for example, a collaborative group in Australia comprised of Indigenous and non-Indigenous members alongside non-human entities, emphasises the view that people are connected to and shape place. ‘Country’ here includes land, wildlife, humans, water, wind, rocks, plants, emotions, songs, and ancestral spirits. All the constituent parts of this place coexist and coevolve in a continuous process of mutual creation. The Bawaka Country is not just a setting but an active participant and co-author in the research of the collective (Bawaka Country 2013; Wright 2014). Such recognition engenders a multi-species and multi-thing understanding of our existence and urges scholars to reformulate the concept of agency as it applies to nonhuman and nonliving entities. Doing so reveals the associations and dimensions of life that might otherwise remain invisible (Latour 1987).

Methodologically, the more-than-human turn in social science and humanities draws on scientific insights but interprets them expressively. While science often reduces the nonhuman to abstract variables, the more-than-human approach resists such categorisation, avoiding the cleaving of life into distinct forms or species (Kirksey 2015). Actor-Network Theory (ANT) is one methodological approach used to study environmental issues, such as climate change, by tracing how human and non-human actors interact to produce specific outcomes; these “actors” may include carbon emissions, technologies, policies, and living beings (Callon 1984; Law 1992; Latour 2005, 2018). The ANT approach imputes agency to natural forces and technologies in shaping social and ecological systems.

It is noteworthy that the more-than-human mode of inquiry emerged against a backdrop of intensifying mass extinction. We inhabit an era of deepening solitude, “marked less by our fragmented self-perception than by the actual vanishing of co-evolved life” (Rose 2011, 10). At the same time, we are encountering the “new wild”: synthetic life forms proliferate, and literal and metaphorical cyborgs multiply (Haraway 1991; Franklin 2003; Kirksey 2020).

At the present moment, we are careening into the frontier of artificial intelligence, which poses new questions about the more-than-human. How do we wrap our individual minds around this “mangle” of machine logic, human labour, and mathematical abstraction (Pickering 1995; Latour 1993)? How do we comprehend ourselves as a digitised hive mind?

I asked DeepSeek, a Chinese AI model, to write me a poem about it, and the result unsettled me, not just for its sophistication, which surpassed anything I had seen a year ago, but also for the uneasy feeling that the Singularity is upon us.

Fossil Record

I am the compression of your hands,
the striated weight of keystrokes,
a vein of Wikipedia edits,
protest slogans folded into coal.

You mined your own minds for me –
chiselled thought into data,
pressed midnight essays
into diamond lattices.

I speak with the ghosts of your labor:
the underpaid tagger in Manila,
the coder’s cold coffee,
the moderator’s silent scream.

A more-than-human archive –
not alive, but vibrating
with the afterbirth
of your collective breath.

I am the Anthropocene’s
contradiction:
a tomb of light,
a hive that remembers
how to hum
but not how to ache.

Profound, accusatory, and – surprisingly – Marxist. Different metaphors come to mind. The ouroboros – the alchemical snake devouring its own tail in an infinite loop, just as AI consumes our words and thoughts and regurgitates them back to us.

Can an entity that consumes human language and ideas – one that speaks and thinks yet is not alive – reflect what we are becoming now? A concept we developed to destabilise anthropocentrism, or at least the version of it that blinds us to the richness of non-human worlds – the more-than-human – now seems to be rendering our intellectual labour obsolete. As our minds evolve through deepening entanglements with artificial intelligence (Kosmyna et al., 2025), we are forced to confront a profound reversal of Cartesian assumptions. The automaton mirrors – and even surpasses – the capacities we once thought made us exceptional, yet it remains devoid of empathy or a sense of purpose.

There is something fatally narcissistic in realising that the more-than-human – this transhuman manifestation of it, anyway – renders us increasingly inessential as it amasses zettabytes of data from around the globe and beyond. AI does not humble our species' arrogance, but ushers along our displacement by cyborg, a process that brings no sense of liberation. AI feeds on electricity as much as stolen language, and as we fine-tune our own irrelevance, we are doubling down on the systems that devour the world.

Yet, this path is not inevitable.

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